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New Haven on the Mend
Connecticut’s Methadone Clinic Con ict and Battle Against the Opioid Crisis
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BY IDONE RHODES Photos by Sam Feibel
On Dixwell Avenue in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood, a large billboard reads: “STOP THE APT FOUNDATION FROM RELOCATING TO NEWHALLVILLE.” When the APT Foundation, a Connecticut not-for-profit organization that provides addiction treatment services, purchased 794 Dixwell, a building at the corner of Dixwell Avenue and Elizabeth Street, in January of this year, they planned to use the space as their new foundation headquarters as well as a substance use disorder treatment facility and methadone clinic. The foundation’s intention to purchase the building was not disclosed to community leaders beforehand, and massive pushback from the Newhallville community has complicated the foundation’s plans to move into the neighborhood.
Newhallville, a neighborhood on the New Haven-Hamden border, is home to longtime residents who care deeply about their community. The neighborhood is battling a variety of systemic issues: poverty, violence and lack of access to healthy foods, amongst others. The area’s residents view the APT Foundation’s move into the neighborhood as yet another roadblock to progress. “We are looking to move forward … in a more positive community … with things that can help us and support us … and not stress our community where it’s going to go backwards,” said Jeanette Sykes, chairwoman of the Newhallville-Hamden Strong movement.
The APT Foundation, founded in 1970 by Herb Kleber, a former faculty member of the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, is one of the oldest addiction treatment programs in the United States. The foundation uses a holistic treatment approach and provides mental health counseling, primary care, housing assistance and vocational training to its patients, in addition to the implementation of pharmacological treatment methods such as methadone maintenance. “At the APT Foundation, we have a very integrated care model,” shared Jeanette Tetrault, a Yale professor of medicine and public health and a sta physician at the foundation. “We provide on-site primary care … as well as having a distinct role in the management of substance use disorder with our patients. We also provide integrated care for things we commonly see in patients with substance use disorder, like HIV and hepatitis C treatment.” Opioid use disorder is not an illness with a wholesale treatment, and the foundation combines a variety of methods to best suit their patients’ needs.
Medication treatment for substance use disorder has proven to be one of the most e ective rehabilitation methods for opioid use disorder. Methadone is an inexpensive, long-acting opioid that, when administered properly and consistently, can allow those recovering from opioid use disorder to stabilize and resume daily life with a decreased risk of overdose should they relapse. Robert
Heimer, a professor of epidemiology and pharmacology at the Yale School of Public Health, described it as the “gold standard treatment for opioid use disorder.” Methadone works by fulfilling a biological need which has been produced by long-term opiate use. Methadone maintenance, the prescription use of methadone, doesn’t get users high, it simply allows people to feel normal again and to lead their lives without debilitating cravings or discomfort that might encourage some to return to illicit drug use. Other treatments such as buprenorphine and naltrexone are available as well.
While the medical community has understood the e ectiveness of methadone for treating opioid use disorder since the 1960s, stigma, ethical concerns and an abstinence-only mindset within the community itself has left methadone as a highly regulated substance. Methadone can only be administered at special clinics, such as those run by the APT Foundation, which are sequestered from general medical services. “A state like Connecticut has 7,000 to 10,000 people a year who are getting abstinence-based treatment and having their tolerance reduced,” Heimer pointed out. If those people relapse and come into contact with fentanyl, their bodies are much less prepared to take on such a potent substance, leading to fatal overdose. Those in methadone treatment programs are less likely to relapse in the first place because their chemical cravings are being met, and if they do relapse, their tolerance is higher, so they are at a lower risk of overdose. The treatment is often used in conjunction with therapy or counseling.
The APT Foundation uses an open access model, meaning the clinics accept walk-in patients for voluntary treatment and counseling regardless of their ability to pay. “We really, really work hard not to turn patients away from treatment and also to keep them engaged in care,” Tetrault explained. The organization treats 8,000 people every year, and people from outside of New Haven commute into the city to receive treatment at their clinics.
For several decades, New Haven has been in the throes of an opioid crisis that has only grown from year to year, parallel to national trends. Twenty-eight percent of Connecticut’s drug overdose deaths since 2015 have taken place in New Haven County, despite the city making up just under a quarter of the Connecticut population. The Connecticut Department of Public Health has tracked the number of unintentional overdose deaths in the state since 2015, which are accessible through a data dashboard. The number of drug-related deaths rises every year, with a 12 percent increase between 2020 and 2021. The
COVID-19 pandemic increased the already-growing number of people using drugs and dying from drug use.
The New Haven Harm Reduction Task Force, founded in 2020, oversees many of the city’s harm reduction programs. “Harm reduction aims to decrease economic and social burdens and help save lives by equipping drug users with the tools necessary to keep themselves and the community safe,” Andressa Granado, an opioid community health worker on the New Haven Harm Reduction Task Force, said. “This could mean providing folks with drug checking supplies such as fentanyl testing strips, or making clean syringes available to prevent the spread of HIV or HEP C.” Their work includes facilitating syringe collection sites, medication take back days and awareness campaigns which aim to foster a sense of community and destigmatize substance use disorder. “Addiction is a community issue, and it requires community compassion and response.”
Increased prescription of opioids in the 1980s and 1990s to address the United States’ undertreated chronic pain problem sowed the seeds of today’s drug epidemic. “The medical establishment and the insurance companies created a situation that the pharmaceutical industry leapt on— it greatly expanded access to pharmaceutical opioids,” Heimer explained. Around 2011, new regulations signifi cantly reduced the amount of pharmaceutical opioids available, but the problem really only started there. “We didn’t increase treatment. … We just cut people loose,” Heimer said. “Some people stopped using [opioids] … Some people couldn’t, so they had to fi nd alternatives.” Many people develop a chemical dependence on their prescribed opiates or get them from a friend or family member with a prescription. When these prescriptions run out, some people turn to illegal drugs to avoid withdrawals.
In the last decade, the proliferation of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids on the illicit drug market has further caused overdoses to soar. Since 2015, fentanyl has been a leading cause of drug-related deaths in Connecticut; it was involved in 71 percent of fatal overdoses. Fentanyl is much stronger than other drugs such as cocaine or heroin and is often mixed in with other substances to make a cheaper product that is also more potent and addictive. Many users are unaware that the drugs they have been sold contain fentanyl.
The city of New Haven, along with other major urban areas in Connecticut such as Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury, has become a hotspot for fatal overdoses. These cities have a far greater instance of drug-related deaths than the cities, towns and suburbs they neighbor. This is in part due to the concentrated populations of these cities, but the design of the state’s public and social service infrastructure contributes to these numbers as well. “New Haven is the magnet for the poor, displaced, and evicted people whose drug use in the suburbs makes their continued living in the suburbs unsustainable,” Heimer said. “Public health, education, housing, transportation — all those things are sort of seen as city or state responsibility.”
Methadone treatment is daily for many patients, so they are required to return to a clinic every day to receive treatment. Due to this model, methadone treatment becomes inaccessible to many who are not easily able to visit a clinic every day. Connecticut’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services categorizes treatment programs by region. Five out of nine of Region Two’s methadone treatment programs are located in New Haven. These nine clinics, four of which are run by the APT Foundation, are intended to service 36 cities and towns in southern central Connecticut. New Haven is grappling with the drug use of not only its own residents, but also the residents of surrounding communities, and its opioid treatment programs take on regional responsibilities, as other communities without reduction and drug use prevention programs rely on New Haven for medical services and treatment programs.
The APT Foundation’s proposed headquarters location “is [in] one of the areas in Newhallville that is making a really strong comeback,” said Barbara Vereen, a local representative of Newhallville and an organizer of the Newhallville-Hamden Strong coalition. “We built a park in that area. The businesses are coming back and thriving. We worked very hard to push in that area to make sure that we cleaned up.” The park in question was once the “Mud Hole,” a vacant lot central to Newhallville’s drug trade. It is now a community greenspace site, in essence a public park, called the Learning Corridor. A Connecticut transit bus stop near the clinic is across the street from this park. The Lincoln-Bassett Community School, a public elementary school, is just down the block.
“Bringing in a methadone clinic can set our neighborhood backwards,” Vereen added. She enumerated her concerns: patients will have to wait outside the clinic for their treatment, needles will be discarded around the clinic, the infrastructure of the area is not prepared for the in-
fl ux of tra c from outsiders coming to the clinic and the building is not in an accessible spot for those coming from outside the city. “We’re a neighborhood that’s dealing with trauma and to put something that’s going to cause more trauma and cause more issues is not good.”
Katurah Bryant, a licensed alcohol and drug counselor and the former assistant clinical director at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in the substance abuse treatment unit, shares these concerns. She believes that neighborhoods like Newhallville, those that are “already economically and fi nancially depressed, largely because we do not receive funds that other neighborhoods receive,” are often taken advantage of as spaces for opioid treatment programs.
The relationship between Newhallville and the APT Foundation was contentious from the start. Newhallville residents expressed frustration that the APT Foundation was not in touch with their community representatives before purchasing the building. Lynn Madden, president and CEO of the APT Foundation, states that the foundation was looking at the building and its zoning alone without considering the surrounding community in their search for a new location. All their other clinics are currently in leased buildings, so the foundation was looking for a space they could purchase. Community members maintain that APT’s lack of consideration of the profi le of the area is irresponsible.
The APT Foundation has long been a source of controversy in New Haven more broadly. “Their foundation has a track record for how they do business in black and brown communities,” Bryant said. City residents see the foundation’s clinics as hotspots for violence as well as drug use and solicitation. They expressed frustration over patients’ behavior while waiting outside the clinics for treatment as well as their conduct on the New Haven Green and other places they may visit on their
way to or from treatment centers. The clinic the APT Foundation currently runs in the Hill Neighborhood has been the subject of complaints and outrage due to allegations of increased crime and violence, drug selling and use and public health hazards such as dirty needles around the site.
Some New Haveners believe the clinics attract more people with substance use disorder to the city and are frustrated by what they view as poor community-membership on the part of the foundation’s leadership. “We’ve created a system that makes it hard to expand [the clinic system] and that makes communities nervous when you say, ‘I want to put a methadone program in [your] neighborhood,’” Heimer said. As neighborhoods that house opioid treatment programs will see an influx of people with opioid use disorder coming into their communities for treatment, clinics become “associated with the notion of all these drug users hanging around, and there is some truth to that.” People remain afraid of or misunderstand what having people with substance abuse order in their neighborhoods means for their communities; some may also be ignorant of the fact that members of their own communities are struggling with addiction.
At a monthly meeting of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team in 2018, Madden refuted many of the allegations against the foundation, citing its important work in the community and the steps it has taken to address concerns and be in communication with the neighborhoods that house its clinics. Her comments were not well received by the New Haveners at the meeting, particularly those who live or operate businesses near the APT Foundation’s clinics. The foundation’s unresponsiveness to previous attempts by community members to reach out has left some skeptical about the organization’s commitment to mending its relationship with the city.
Since the public became aware of the sale of the Dixwell Avenue property at the beginning of January, Newhallville has united to oppose the foundation’s move with rallies, public hearings, letters of support from surrounding communities and a petition that has gathered over 1, 000 signatures from local residents. Per the Yale Daily News’ reporting from a protest at the proposed Dixwell Avenue site in early February, community leaders and concerned citizens gathered to speak out against the APT Foundation’s move into Newhallville with impassioned speeches about the crime, violence and other negative impacts that the clinic would bring to the community. Both New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett were in attendance. “We are reaching out and gaining support from the Greater New Haven Area. We are reaching out to our legislators to ask for their support,” Vereen shared.
In their petition, Newhallville-Hamden Strong proposes fi nding “alternate solutions to treating county patients su ering from addiction.” “I’m not going to put [the clinic] in another community because I don’t believe any community should have it,” said Sykes. “There are appropriate industrial areas that it should be in where everybody can get support.”
Opinions are divided regarding the impact of a clinic more accessible to Newhallville residents. “It’s better to have a treatment program in your neighborhood than to have drug users who are unwilling to go elsewhere for treatment continue to be drug users in your neighborhood,” explained Heimer. On the other hand, Bryant said, “I mean we can always, always, always use more, but there’s adequate spaces … places that are more appropriate for this kind of service than down the street from an elementary school or near the corner where children have to catch the bus.” Bryant cites other programs that are available to the citizens of Newhallville seeking treatment in the broader New Haven area, such as the Connecticut Mental Health Center and MAAS CASA. Opioid treatment programs, particularly those which o er medication treatment, are highly stigmatized spaces. The APT Foundation’s mission may in fact be better suited for a di erent location, but viewing these clinics as inherently dangerous or detrimental spaces can contribute to a larger narrative which disparages people with addictions in their journey to treat a chronic disease. “I wish no one felt
that way. Look at what we are providing, what we are doing,” Tetrault said. “On the other hand, constantly pushing treatment programs into residential neighborhoods may not be the right answer. In a perfect world, methadone, which is an evidence-based treatment for a highly morbid condition, would not be segregated from the rest of health care.”
An alternative use for the Dixwell Avenue space as a community wellness and education center is now on the table, and Rev. Boise Kimber and the New Haven-based mental health organization Cli ord Beers were awarded a $2 million state grant to go towards the proposed Resilience Academy. “It can be used for a fresh food market. It can be used for … mental health services for the community. It can be used for … our children in this community. Just by being a black or brown person in America you are traumatized, so we need healing spaces,” Bryant said. “I mean there’s so many things that can go into that space — meeting spaces, education spaces, training spaces.”
In response to plans for Resilience Academy, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker announced that the APT Foundation would put their applications for zoning approvals for the Dixwell Avenue building on pause to see if they can fi nd another suitable location to move to. Discussion between local government, Newhallville residents and the APT Foundation to resolve this issue is still ongoing. Another press conference and rally led by members of the Newhallville-Hamden Strong coalition, called the “Hour of Prayer,” took place outside the site on May 21. According to reporting from The New Haven Register, Kim Harris, president of the Newhallville Community Management Team, said at the event: “We are in solidarity… This (battle) is going to have a huge impact on who we are and where we live. … There’s been a unifi cation in Newhallville that is here to stay.”
As Newhallville gathers support to keep the APT Foundation out of their neighborhood, they are also building a coalition within the New Haven community that has the power to inhibit the mission of the APT Foundation more generally. The foundation’s clinics in commercial areas such as Long Wharf have been cause for complaint in the past, as has the mere presence of people from these programs at bus stops and on the New Haven Green. Wherever the foundation moves, the community’s concerns will follow. Conversely, the opioid epidemic is showing no signs of slowing down, and communities in New Haven are going to have to bear the responsibility of treating citizens with opioid use disorder.
The situation in Connecticut is representative of a nationwide drought of opioid treatment programs, or OTPs. For example, “the Veteran A airs health care system has a total of 33 OTPs nationally,” Gabriela Garcia, director of the Opioid Treatment Program for the Virginia Connecticut Healthcare System, said. The clinic system not only precipitates the insu ciency of treatment availability but also promotes the misconceptions associated with opioid use disorder by physically separating these services from general medical care. “Limiting treatment to these clinics can be a barrier because A) they could not be available, and B) people feel the stigma, and they don’t want to go there.”
Heimer believes there is a much more effective model for methadone distribution, one that is already in practice for many other prescription drugs. He proposes allowing patients to pick up their monthly supply of methadone at their local pharmacy and to administer the drug themselves. “We have so demonized drug users that we don’t think of them as capable of self-control,” Heimer explained. However, research demonstrates this is a misconception.
When visiting clinics daily for treatment became untenable due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, loosened methadone regulations to allow for take-home self-administration of the drug. “Clinics are probably implementing di erent approaches at this point, with the loosening of federal guidelines … during COVID,” said Garcia. “We have people coming to clinic once a week or every two weeks that in the past might have come much more often.” A study led by Heimer at the Yale School of Public found that this model did not lead to an increase in methadone overdose-related deaths or reduce the number of people participating in treatment. “I have a patient who said: ‘My family now thinks this is just a treatment. I get a prescription every 30 days. I take my medication every day. They fi nally don’t look at methadone as a problem,” Tetrault shared. This methadone maintenance model is far less intrusive to the daily lives of patients. Experts are advocating for an indefi nite continuation of these pandemic-induced practices, but the path to reform is slow.
The clinic-based system for methadone distribution creates a plethora of hurdles to successful treatment. Opioid treatment programs become stigmatized, unwelcoming spaces, and the clinics are often too far and few between to be easily accessible. Whether the travel time is too long to make the trip on such a regular basis or impedes patients’ ability to maintain jobs and mend relationships or people feel disrespected in the communities and spaces they have to be in to access treatment, the current model can deter people from starting or maintaining treatment, as Garcia explained. Creating more opioid treatment programs may alleviate the issue of accessibility, but this plan would not be easily achieved given how di cult it is to establish these clinics, as evidenced by the current situation in Newhallville.
By integrating pharmacological treatments for substance use disorder into the broader medical community, an interprofessional approach across medical disciplines becomes more feasible, allowing holistic care for the illness itself, as well as its associated comorbidities. “If there were changes in regulations around methadone, we could link it to things like federally qualifi ed health centers. We could link it to hospital-based clinics. We could link it to pharmacies,” Tetrault shared. “Then none of this would be an issue.” Recontextualizing opioid use disorder as a chronic disease, one which requires consistent, accessible, evidence-based treatments such as methadone, will bring us closer to meeting this epidemic where it’s at and o ering communities the help they need.
“Drug user stigma has taught us all the wrong ways to think, feel and talk about people with substance use disorder, and it has a ected our policies, funding and programming meant to assist individuals and families,” Granado said. “Until we fundamentally change how we decide the amount of respect, dignity and care that people are deserving of, regardless of their drug use status, we will continue to hurt the communities we are trying to help.”
// Kim Lagunas
Oscar Lopez
The choir renders hosannas of seashores and crashing surf, hoping the Ocean will talk back. Fishers of men throw nets over the worshipers’ heads, try capturing a devotion paid for in blood. For now, though, the folding and bending of palm leaves into crucifixions will su ce. Washingtonia robusta, or Mexican fan palm: a tree that’s known the Valley for as long as our abuelos and bisabuelos have. In the screeching pew, I look to my family, watch them make a dead man’s prophecy out of a living thing’s crown and I pray for His return, and saltwater, and the knowledge needed for palm folding. Today, my uncle makes my cross, but I am not gentle enough with it, and so I unravel Calvary as the choir’s music rises, exploding into exultant Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I join with them in song, sending my voice in search of clouds deep enough to hold my shame, that which is most Catholic in me. My family and I hold washingtonia robusta leaves to our chests while we pray, make Mexican fan palm a talisman for the dispossessed. Their leaves rising and curling ‘round the open air, bathing in the blueness of the sky. Not natural, but naturalized, making away with the misnomer of citizenship. I cannot tell my beloveds that I feel my skin being pulled tight over my skull, diaphanous as it hangs from my cheekbones like curtains doing a piss-poor job of hiding a writhing tongue. There, in a twisted bed, I ask Jesus, my Jesus, to please take the thoughts away, and the Spirit moves, bends my arms and fingers crooked. Yale Daily News | 23 | 31
The Walk Along Prospect Street
Gavin Guerrette
Spotlighting the Unique Connection between the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale Divinity School Photos by Lily Dorstewitz
The walk “down the hill” on Prospect Street from the Divinity School — the highest geographical point on Yale’s campus — to the School of the Environment, has been described by students as representative of their experience of the unique relationship that exists between the two graduate schools.
“I always felt like I was moving through a portal as I went up and down the street, because the social and intellectual environment is so di erent at the two schools,” said Elizabeth Allison, an early student of the religion and ecology joint degree program.
Allison explained that students get the “perennial” through spiritual and ethical exploration at the Divinity School and the “urgent” through the study of environmental degradation and injustice at the School of the Environment. Somewhere during that walk between classes, the students are equidistant from both schools, and many feel that it represents the broader intersection of their disciplines. As these students walk up and down the street, they embrace the scientific and the spiritual, surrounded by a world dense with meaning in both directions.
Yale, like many universities throughout the world, o ers a wide range of joint degree programs for its graduate students. Joint degree programs are characterized by enrollment in two concurrent graduate programs o ered between graduate schools in pursuit of one degree. The Yale School of the Environment o ers 11 joint degree programs which its joint degree website explains “are ideal for students interested in applying environmental management frameworks to particular research or professional contexts beyond the scope of YSE’s traditional o erings.” The Yale Divinity School also has seven joint degree programs.
Most joint degrees o ered at Yale and elsewhere are considered practical with respect to professional applicability. But there is one School of the Environment and Divinity School joint degree program which does not at first glance appear to be as practical as its counterparts: the joint degree in religion and ecology. Professors John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, jointly appointed senior lecturers and research scholars at the School of the Environment have championed the necessity of the degree. Science and policy are necessary, they said, but not entirely su cient, in addressing the environmental crises we face today. From their view, the incorporation of religious and ethical frameworks is crucial to understanding and appealing to the factors that motivate substan-
tive change. Tucker and Grim have spent much of their careers expanding this field of interdisciplinary scholarship as the co-founders and directors of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, a forum that hosts conferences and publishes research from a range of religious and environmental scholarship which has been based at Yale since 2006.
Yale is one of the only universities in the country to o er a degree program of this kind and as such serves as the center for activism and scholarship rooted in the relationship between religion and ecology. In addition to the joint degree program, which typically has an enrollment of five students per year, the cross listed courses o ered between both the School of the Environment and the Divinity School are open to all students from any of Yale’s graduate schools as well as undergraduates from Yale College.
"Science and policy are necessary, but not entirely sufcient, in addressing the environmental crises we face today.”
A New Approach
The relationship between the Divinity School and the School of the Environment at Yale has been a formative experience for students because it exposes them to a new method of thinking about environmental issues that they carry with them throughout their education and professional career.
“The conjunction between the two schools has been really powerful in helping to galvanize interdisciplinary research and the ways in which environmental changes and harms are a ecting communities and the religious responses of those communities,” said Sam King DIV ’22, a masters student in religion and ecology and a research associate at the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.
Tucker and Grim have heavily emphasized interdisciplinarity in their role as jointly appointed professors and co-directors of the Forum on Religion and Ecology. This interdisciplinary network has created an environment where students feel more comfortable to explore new approaches to environmental issues.
“There was this sense of openness that, by virtue of me being in both programs at the same time, professors were more willing to let me explore the ideas that I wanted to,” said Anna Thurston DIV ENV ’19, a former joint degree student and current research associate at the Forum on Religion and Ecology.
This freedom has also prompted students in the joint degree program to embrace nontraditional avenues of discussion
and research to the environmental crises our planet faces today. In the scientific community, there is a widespread understanding of the managerial solutions for ecological problems — the technical decisions regarding things such as resource allocation, fossil fuel usage, forestry initiatives, etc. — but there is a lack of motivational components, such as religion or ethics, being incorporated into these same discussions, as Tucker has explained. The discipline of religion and ecology seeks to understand and utilize what motivates individuals towards implementing ecological solutions. The joint degree in religion and ecology combines a technical approach with a moral or faith-based approach so that students of the program have an understanding of both dimensions.
This combined approach does not, however, represent a rejection of the necessary and scientifically supported solutions to environmental issues; rather, it represents a willingness to explore what can motivate people towards these solutions.
“There has been a realization among these students that we need more than just kind of managerial or bureaucratic responses to the crisis,” said Willie Jennings, an as-
sociate professor of systematic theology and africana studies at the Divinity School. “We really need to be thinking very deeply about its underlying philosophical and theological problems.”
The students of this program are encouraged to make it their own through the coursework, research, and fieldwork that they partake in while enrolled, said Thurston. As Grim explained, “This is a new field and people have to invent themselves. They almost have to invent the positions that they are going to fulfill with this degree.” The joint degree program often attracts people who have a strong vision of how they might take up this interdisciplinary work in their own fields — whether as a priest, a forester or an academic, there are unmistakable benefits to the unique education that this joint degree program provides.
Yale Divinity School
Yale School of the Environment
The History of Religion and Ecology at Yale
While Grim and Tucker acknowledge their role in progressing the interdisciplinary movement, they see Thomas Berry, a professor they studied under at Fordham University and a longtime mentor, as being foundational to the work they are doing today. Grim and Tucker, who are married,
met as students of Berry and have continued his work in various directions. In addition to several other projects, they have co-authored a biography of his life and produced an Emmy award winning film called “Journey of the Universe” which is inspired by Berry’s essay, “The New Story.”
However, the formal relationship between religion and ecology began at Harvard University. Grim and Tucker organized a series of 10 conferences on world religions and ecology hosted by the Center for the Study of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School between 1996 and 1998. The conferences, which had over 800 collaborators including leading scholars, theologians, religious leaders and environmental specialists from around the world, produced 10 volumes of articles written for the conferences. These articles would go on to serve as the foundation of a new field of study in religion.
“If we had done the conferences but not published the books, religion and ecology would not have been as well seeded,” said Tucker. “It really gave people the chance to get a feeling for what religion and ecology is all about.”
While Harvard was working to develop an environmental studies program, Tucker and Grim sought a university with a strong environmental foundation that could provide more comprehensive support to the ecological dimension of their work. At this time former Dean of the Yale School of the Environment — then called the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies — James Gustave Speth, had invited Grim and Tucker to Yale to establish a more formal relationship between religion and ecology at the University. With its century-long history of environmental study and a receptive faculty and administration, the School of the Environment was an ideal candidate.
Speth recognized the value in their work, saying “Their reception at YSE was a natural [one] it seemed to me, given the imperative of a new consciousness in addressing the environment,” and brought Grim and Tucker to the University in 2005. With the help of faculty members Margaret Farley of the Divinity School and Steve Kellert of the School of the Environment, who also went on to play mentorship roles for students of the program, the joint degree program in religion and ecology was established. As Attridge explained, Tucker and Grim’s joint appointments, along with cross-listing courses between the schools and o ering the join-degree program, helped formalize the Divinity’s School’s long-held tradition of combining the theoretical and the practical.
“Given both their backgrounds — Mary Evelyn in Eastern religions and John in native American religions — it made an awful lot of sense,” Attridge said about Grim and Tucker’s joint appointments. “That proved to be a very fruitful relationship and has stimulated a lot of student interest at the Divinity School regarding issues of environmental ethics and the like.”
The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology was also established in 2006 with the arrival of Tucker and Grim. It has since played an active role in promoting the study of religion and ecology in academic and religious communities. The forum has hosted several conferences since it was founded at Yale, generating a wide range of scholarship in the growing field of religion and ecology. The forum has published as well as publicized numerous books and research articles, compiling a comprehensive body of work for the field of religion and ecology that can be found on their website. Students of the joint degree program also work closely with Tucker and Grim through the Forum on Religion and Ecology as research associates. The forum has always been at the academic center of the religion and ecology movement, but Tucker and Grim have undertaken an effort to make their work more accessible through a series of massive open online courses titled, “Religion and Ecology: Restoring the Earth Community.” On the coursera platform, Tucker and Grim have 13 courses covering a wide range of world religions and their Journey of the Universe project, with over 30,000 students.
Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Pioneers of Interdisciplinary Thinking
Both current and former students, faculty colleagues and deans of the School of the Environment and the Divinity School applaud Grim and Tucker for their dedication to engaging with the natural world, their students and their scholarship. The e ect that this engagement has had is tangible in the enthusiasm of their students and admiration of their colleagues. Tucker and Grim have facilitated an environment for their students where they are welcome to experiment and encouraged to draw on personal experience, teaching the substantive material of religion and ecology to their students, but also showing them that there are di erent ways to think about and discuss the natural world and their place within it.
“Mary Evelyn and John are really at the core of the intersection between the two schools. There is a lot of community around them as professors and mentors alike,” said Jordan Boudreau ’19, an architectural designer and environmental educator who took many of Tucker and Grim’s classes as an undergraduate. “[Tucker and Grim] were the two most important professors in my college career and I think they have also been really meaningful to a lot of other people.”
Jennings agreed with Boudreau on the positive impact of Grim and Tucker on students and faculty alike at Yale. “They are a real treasure here at Yale and a real force in the global conversation about this relationship between religion and ecology,” he said.
Samuel King, a research associate at the Forum on Religion and Ecology and a third-year master’s student in religion and ecology, is in accordance with Jennings: “Professors Grim and Tucker have been absolutely transformative in being bridge builders between the School of the Environment and the Divinity School, and more profoundly, between ways of knowing — between a more quantitative, reductionistic bottle of science and a more holistic view of religious communities and the values of religions and cultures throughout the world.”
“They are part of the bedrock of the broader field of religion and ecology beyond Yale. There is tremendous respect for the foundation that they have laid for these interdisciplinary dialogues on the whole, not just for religion and ecology,” said Rachel Holmes, the first student of the joint degree program and an urban forestry strategist for North America at the Nature Conservancy. “They were doing it before it was the cool thing to do, before everyone was clamoring for interdisciplinary scientists.”
The Student Experience
The experience of students at the intersection of the School of the Environment and the Divinity School is intellectually diverse, providing them with a space especially conducive to powerful conversation amongst one another and the formulation of a new way of looking at the world. Students gain an exposure to the world religions and their ways of understanding the environment through the curriculum of the joint degree program and the Forum on Religion and Ecology.
“I think it helped me and the other students destabilize or question the relationship that our modern capitalist world has with the natural world,” Boudreau said about the joint degree program. “The Western capitalist world has a very exploitative and extractive relationship with nature that is made to feel natural. I learned through those courses that there has been such a plurality of ways that people have understood their relationship with the natural world and with local ecosystems.”
In many ways, joint degree program students are encouraged to bring their relationship with their faith, their past experiences, as well as their personal interests to the table for discussion with their peers. While students enrolled in the dual degree program tend to lean towards one end of the religion and ecology spectrum, the program allows them to incorporate their interests and expand their views in both directions.
“In my cohort of those of us who were pursuing dual degrees, we all came at it from very di erent perspectives,” Thurston said. “Some came with a more religious perspective — I had a classmate who was getting ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church who wanted to be able to speak on environmental justice issues. I was going in with a more environmental humanities perspective. But you can really see how it could attract di erent people based on their end goals.”
Student organizations such as FERNS — Faith, Environment, Religion, Nature, Spirituality — or the Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology at Yale — GCRE — an annual interdisciplinary graduate conference organized by graduate students of the two schools, are further examples of how students might incorporate their various interests outside of the classroom.
With an understanding of both the technical and motivational solutions to the environmental issues we face today, the students of the joint degree program bring a unique perspective to the ways in which we interact with the environment and one another. While students of the program often have vastly di erent interests, they are equipped to serve the environment in a way that few other students in the world are.
Sonnet (Exegesis)
Abigail Sylvor Greenberg
A critic at The New York Times, referencing another critic, has dubbed this era A “no-context context.” It’s because of “semiotics” and Lil Nas X wearing three outfits At the Met Gala. I just learned what exegesis means. I guess I have a lot to feel sorry about. Wanting too badly to be in good Places with good people and not being very discerning about my definition Of “good.” Wanting to talk about text like a man, With the longest, most distended sentences, Wanting a vertical belly button and a low hairline.
Everything bad happens at once, makes a tall wreckage At my feet. I wait for some gale to blow it over.
This will be the year I stop writing about men. There are three in This poem, if you count the two critics. I assume the two critics are men. I don’t think a woman would say “no-context context.” I think women are born in context and never really change.
